Scrivener Creative Review is a MontrĂŠal-based international literary
journal. Active since 1982, it publishes poetry, fiction, art/
photography and book reviews from established and emerging
artists alike. For more content and information on how to
submit to Scrivener, please visit:
http://ausmcgill.com/scr

Things Said or Overheard in Montreal
I cut my finger on a tin of garbanzo beans.
Don’t mind him, he just hates nuns.
Do you still want me to put a log in the fireplace?
The bunnies are hiding.
If I don’t get it right away, I don’t like it.
I think we’re all in the mood for pizza.
Drop us off here.
Better sorry than safe, I always say.
What kind of dressing would you like?
Well, that’s an existential question.
Whales are still endangered.
I think he must be bipolar.
The key to the front door doesn’t work.
There was a house fire in Nova Scotia.
The couscous is delicious!
But what does it mean?
Bear in mind, we’re all visitors here.
Doesn’t this egg taste more authentic cooked on a wood stove?
Yes, but which village in New Zealand?
Bagels. We need to buy bagels before we leave.

Greg Santos
6

Goshorun: For Whom Have You Determined Me? 1X6FfmCELnQ
(De채t Boperlun, August 2011)

Daniel Galef
7

To See The Ships
By this shore,
On the cusp of the culture
Where
Pale moon skin begs a boy
To un-clumsy his hands, unwind his tongue
On the woman who wears affection
Like water wears fire.
The ships arrive;
Carrying seed and spice.
Their captains may see us
And they will pass.
Leaving us
Near the tide of man
Leaving me to be taken
From blindness to light.
You brought me to the water to see the ships.
To help bring the sun to them.
To teach me your body,
Proving my ignorance of all things
On the cusp of the culture that means nothing
And will mean nothing again.
And again
When I remember your lessons.
â&#x20AC;&#x192;

Miguel Eichelberger
8

Tokyo Harbour
On the docks, umbrellas
open and close like gills
in the still-­twitching rain.
Fishermen unzip the salmons’
rich coats, reach in
and, slick as pickpockets,
pull the guts out
like fat watches on chains.
By that, I don’t even mean
how hurriedly she would strip
the bed afterwards,
or how I got sea-­sick
on the ferry to her funeral.
How time spills out of me.

Dominique Bernier-Cormier
9

Untitled No. 2

Untitled No. 3

Ivanna Besenovsky
10

Untitled No. 4

Untitled No. 5

Ivanna Besenovsky
11

Brazen Bull
1
The sun shone strong in the middle of nowhere. Archie had the windows
open, could hear the truck spraying unpacked road into the bush, feel the coastal
wind, cool and safe in the shadow. Overhead, drones drowsed undetected in the
crease-less gray blanket of the sky. Now more or less the champion of mindfulness,
Archie thought about retirement instead. About the house he’d just bought in Fort
Lauderdale, the way it would it would feel each morning to wake up before the sun,
slip out of bed while Laura slept, and run along the coast to the tune of the dawn
chorus.
He arrived at the Facility’s gate, flashed his ID, and made small talk with
the boys, their guns leaning off their bodies like little babies in front-carriers. They
reminded him of his son. Two weeks left on the clock and then he’d be driving
up and through the Americas to a similar gate, his pension and savings more than
enough to pay off Antoni’s student loans, connections enough to make fluid what for
others would be an endless process of sneaking across carefully guarded thresholds.
He thought, this was life, and started humming “Everybody Knows” while he parked
the truck.
But as he pressed the password and swiped the passkey and stepped
into the biometric scanner, his thoughts returned to M3-22-26, how he’d stopped
screaming yesterday, and what this meant for Archie, not so much professionally, as
chief interrogator, but in terms of his personality, his manhood, whether or not this
augured well. The doctor said M3-22-26’s vocal chords were strained but functional.
He’d said this with confidence. The question now was whether the detainee’s
muteness was elective or imposed from within via subterranean protocols.
In civilian life, Archie was registered as Arcangelo Senza. He was Archie
to his friends, Archie Bunker to his colleagues and to those in the know, the
gatekeepers who traded in files un-redacted, veiled forces that have somehow
congealed into people whose only task in life is to find bodies, to turn bodies into
information. But to the detainees, under all these feet of concrete and continents of
fibre optic cable, who were both the intended audience and constitutive members
of the screaming choir, Archie was a shadow and a whisper. They shouted each time

Mat Sanza
12

he passed their cells, waking each other from their desert-island dreams into a place
they knew not where, only that it was down, deep
“Down?” the receptionist asked, unfamiliar to Archie, a new hire, probably
from the base. “Where else?” Lots of turnover, he thought. People eager to move down
floors, get to the manual labour, sustained human interaction, health benefits. Like
the generation before them, these people were groomed to hold the future chief
among temporalities, and so regardless of the direction they would keep moving.
Especially after they ran the economy’s death knell. Even black sites got squeezed
by the department, perhaps in disproportion to other operations. They were in the
process of restructuring Hell.
Most of the new guys would never get halfway down the Facility. Very few
even knew how many levels there were. In fact, a key move was to threaten moving
the detainee down a floor or two. This was always an option, since there were, at
least psychologically, an infinite amount of floors in the Facility.
The receptionist looked up from his phone and laughed. Archie thought
he looked young, like a teenage JFK. He put his phone on the desk (it was paused
on a YouTube video of a waterboarding competition) and absently tapped some
keys on the keyboard. He went back to his video and Archie looked at the now
opened elevator door, pausing where he stood, as though giving it the chance to seal
and descend without a passenger. But it waited for him, as he knew it would. He
stepped forward, inhaled the lobby’s humid hospital-musk, and went down.
2
M3-22-26 wasn’t speaking or howling or whimpering or lobbing curses at
the CIA, as he so often did. He just sat there and convulsed. In his beard new layers
of blood and sweat formed over the old ones. There was a bump on his elbow the
shape and size of an ostrich egg, skin tight around it, stretched to transparency.
Archie thought he could see the substance of the detainee’s body urging itself
outward, a soul passing through the borders of the flesh, and yet, he couldn’t seem to
squeeze anything out of him that was like intelligence.
“Where are your friends?” Archie asked in Spanish, his gringo accent now
completely gone. He ran more current and repeated the question. The detainee
looked like he was somewhere else, probably dreaming of return to them. Probably

Mat Sanza
13

in the village on the hills. Yes, they were probably only a few dozen miles away
from the Facility at this very moment, shielded by sympathetic or bribed or coerced
townsfolk. They should’ve just carpet-bombed the whole village, and all the closest
ones too, just to be sure. But this wasn’t the 70s. You couldn’t just erase the map, at
least not in South America. It was getting harder and harder to be a perfectionist
down here.
“You know as well as I that we’re going soft on you, M3-22-26. Electrodes
are, like, the first circle of hell. That’s to say, Limbo. And, as we all know, Limbo is
where the best of the irredeemable go. We basically like you, M3-22-26.”
The detainee didn’t react and mostly couldn’t. His legs and arms were
bound to the chair, and his head slouched in the only resting position available,
which was forward and down.
“That’s where we are. The most famous border-town in the universe. The
edge of horror. Exiles and philosophers, not unlike yourself, hanging out in a spooky
castle. If only they could have known they were on the wrong side. You know what
I’m talking about. You’re a well-read man, libraries upon libraries of banned books
in your head. Smart? I’m not so sure. But well-read all the same.” Archie paused for
effect. The electric-machine whirred. “A lot of the kids we bring to the Facility can’t
even write their own names. And yet, even they know how speak, how to sing, even,
when we turn on the machines.”
Archie secretly compared himself to Dante. Pain-translator. And is it not for
the pleasure of the saints that we are permitted perfect vision of the damned in their
limitless contortion? Archie thought yes, of course. But what did this pleasure consist
of. He wasn’t sure. Maybe before, in the renegade days, the disappearing days, the
days of conspiracy, it was edifying. He’d expressed the Country’s unconscious. He’d
mobilized and was the permeating secret.
Now there was no secret. The torture report had done away with that. All
the public admissions, years earlier, like a primer, had done the same if not more to
siphon off the steam. They wanted to make it normal, to fit it into Life as we know
it, to give the concept limbs, get it off and running and shaking hands. Nowadays,
for Archie at least, there was basically nothing to desire except retirement’s slow
passing of days, to become an enigma to one’s self, to stand in the shadow of one’s
own life, slipping through the sweet nothing of retirement before the big nothing
swallowed you whole and… No, Archie thought, don’t go down there. Stay positive. He
tried to treat himself like a child. He tried to be kinder to himself.

Mat Sanza
14

Archie plugged the detainee three times in a row and then sat silently with
him. Later, he pulled the detainee’s file from off the table and rifled through it. There
were no rousing details. The detainee had no family, no property in his name. He
was writer of tracts, a pamphleteer, a speech-writer and -maker. But the literary
angle hadn’t worked. One of his compatriots, a bomb-maker from Colombia, used to
be a couple floors down, but he was dead. There was nothing to leverage except the
detainee’s body itself. It mostly comes down to what you can do with a body.
Hours passed. The technique used on the first floor, as Archie knew, was
a way to make detainees fully aware of their bodies, so that, once the internal map
of the self was fully charted, each infinitesimal point could be lit up. He wanted to
bring the detainee down a floor or two but there were no free rooms, and the empty
ones were being sterilized. So he waited. He played snake on his phone. He ran
through his grocery list. He meditated. It was a hot day and despite his best efforts
he felt his patience slipping, his energy waning. He did some push-ups. Periodically,
he’d give the detainee a shock.
When he was told that they would have to wait until tomorrow to move
the detainee downward, Archie figured he would have one last go. He cranked up
the voltage. Higher than was policy. It was unlike him to him to risk a blunder on
the first level, but he was annoyed and tired and wasn’t in any danger of losing his
job. His brain had grown a bit foggy. He didn’t know which floor he was on, or even
that he was underground. He wasn’t sure what to do but to squeeze the control
knob and keep twisting.
The detainee’s body seized backward and his eyes opened as wide as
possible so that he looked possessed. But he was not possessed. Smoked in the
smoke of his own flesh, the detainee felt, for the first time, the entire confluence of
tiny machines that made up his body, their pivots, joints and pulleys, their channels,
dams and levees, their flows flowing forward or jammed-up or dissolving now,
entering into a new pact with the electric-machine, becoming something new
altogether. He was ecstatic.
Archie shut off the machine and ran to the detainee, unbound him and laid
him on the floor. He radioed the medics while the egg in the detainee’s arm hatched,
staining Archie’s shirt with blood and something else. He understood what had
happened, saw that he’d crossed a line, but it was too late.
The detainee’s soul had left the body there in the chair. It fled like air from
the throat, and travelled upward, through the concrete, past the break-room, past

Mat Sanza
15

the lobby, then higher still. The soul drifted up and waved to its comrades.
They were in the Burrow, a network of tunnels at the edge of the city, happy that
they were safe underground. The soul flew past the drones and kept rising. In the
direction of the Sun, in whose heart his secret and his silence would be sealed
forever.
It was the detainee’s body alone that was trafficked downwards, until the
gravity-well grew too strong and pulled the body from its form, returning it to the
earth. By then Archie was already in his new home, in the gated community, the
detainee and his silence mostly forgotten.
3
It was after. Archie was barbequing a lunch for one when he got a call from
the Agency. The man on the phone sounded young, must’ve been just a child when
Archie was in Chile. They wanted him to do some work in Broward County area.
There was talk of new terrors to come, sleeping giants. Eggs of dissent were about
to hatch. Archie said he wasn’t interested in driving around, in putting the hurt on
people. He was getting very tired early in the day. He was too old. The Agent said,
“We’re about done with the details. It’s an independent initiative. Strictly verbal.
Passed mouth to mouth.” Archie’s heart palpitated. “The enemy has spread across
and into and through almost everything. We need vigilant, discreet people.” Archie’s
language-centre went temporarily untenanted. There was a pause. “You could do
remote consulting, part time,” the Agent offered. Archie held the phone in the crease
of his neck and shoulder while he lathered BBQ sauce on the smoking ribs, adjusted
knobs on the grill. They were overcooking. He told himself he wasn’t interested.
He told the Agent, “I appreciate the offer, I appreciate that you respect the work
I’ve done. But I am old. I want to lie on the beach and drink piña coladas. I want to
spend time with my kid, with my wife. I want to not overcook these ribs.”
“I understand,” said the Agent, and hung up. He didn’t sound angry. There
had always been and always would be others.
Archie took the half-rack of ribs off the grill and put them in the plastic
plate. He walked along the sandy bridal path that snaked its way to the beach,
chafing in his flip-flops. A cigar-smoking neighbour waved to him from his balcony.
Archie saw him through the fence and nodded back to the figure, shouting “Hey!” to

Mat Sanza
16

the figure, intersected a hundred times over.
When he got to the beach he put the plastic plate on the sand, took the
folding chair out from under his arm and struggled to open it. It was the early
afternoon. He got it open, dug it deep into the sand. Then he picked up the plate,
pulled the plastic fork and knife from his bathing-suit pocket and put the meat to
his mouth. Even with the sauce it tasted horrible. Dry.
He put the food down and looked at the ocean in front of him, the horizon
altogether empty except for the flying machines, the body of water calm. Everything
before him looked flat like on a television screen, even the patrol drone that lingered
motionless in the sky.
All of a sudden it was too early and it was too late. He was hearing
birdsong. He was hearing rain. Something like lightning shot through his body. For a
brief moment he felt as though he were not a person, but rather a statue, a hot statue
caressed by the hands of the Sun, and in this moment he panicked for he thought he
might not ever become a human again. He felt like there was nothing inside of him
except sand and stone, heating up. Then his neck shot back and he was made to
look directly at the Sun.
It wasn’t right. Either he’d shut his eyes or gone blind because everything
turned black, even his thoughts, which were hot and dark, clinging to and bleeding
through each other like Pompeiian lovers. Then the dry, dry meat slid from his
mouth into his throat, so that his soul, which had tried all the other exits, which
had knocked the flesh of its knuckles right off and beat it its palms nerveless, could
not move past this dry, fleshy cork, and so it stayed there screaming, at the world’s
terminus, forever.

Mat Sanza
17

“My Form Bleats”:
A Review of Ken Babstock’s On Malice
(Coach House Books, 2014)

On Malice by Ken Babstock (2014) is a precisely calculated exercise in
disorientation. Babstock conjures a bewildering world in poetic forms that are
modeled on the mechanical techniques of data extraction used in text mining,
surveillance technology, and computer network filtering. The largest section of
the book “SIGINT” contains 39 ‘sonnets’ that—in Babstock’s own words—“‘occur’
inside the abandoned NSA surveillance station on the summit of Teufelsberg
(‘Devil’s Mountain’) in Berlin, Germany” (93). To further defamiliarize the poetic
form, Babstock replaces the final couplet of each sonnet with “incident reports”
(93) of collisions in 1970s Soviet airspace. In “SIGINT,” Babstock pastes together
intercepted messages, unanswered questions, and fragments of consciousness to
create a diffuse compilation of human data only barely confined by the sonnet form.
“No limit to the streaming of form from the machine” (77), claims the speaker of the
book’s third poem “Deep Packet Din”; this line adroitly captures the reader’s sense
that “SIGINT” is created by a computer program whose ability to produce these
sonnets is limitless. Even in the trackless wasteland of this sequence, however,
Babstock repeatedly draws on vocabulary from “Walter Benjamin’s record of his
son’s language acquisition between the ages of two and six” (93); the recurrence of
simple words such as “anus,” “green,” and “dress” create eerie moments of memory
and recognition amidst the jumble of surveillance data. “What gets learned from all
this listening” (48), asks the speaker of one sonnet, just one of many moments in
“SIGINT” that double as meta-poetic statements and comments on surveillance or
data collection technology. The question of “what gets learned” from these poems
is not a central poetic thesis but only one data point amidst thousands in the echo
chamber of this collection. In another self-reflexive moment, the speaker states
“this is not a waiting room” (13), and draws attention to the readerly temptation
to view the sonnets’ lack of cohesion as inherently creating a liminal poetic space.
In Babstock’s imagination, fragmentation is not the antechamber for conceptual
coherence.

Christy Frost
18

The book’s title On Malice derives from several lines in the poem “Perfect
Blue Distant Objects”:
Very seldom are reports raised, or any
imaginings of present
disappointments, great estimates by individuals
high
on malice, constantly juiced on malice. (68)
Here, Babstock playfully changes the meaning of “on” in the title—as indicating the
topic of inquiry—to a form of the word that connotes drug usage. This blurring of
the meanings of “on” suggests that to write on a specific subject may be little more
than to use that subject as an intoxicant. It is possible to read this conclusion as a
justification for Babstock’s poetic forms; rather than allowing a single subjectivity
“high / on malice” to create “imaginings of present / disappointments” and “great
estimates,” Babstock attempts to let his poetic data be shaped by the mechanical
patterns and codes of dispassionate machines.
“Finally, he says, I and everything / have a limit” (22), concludes the
speaker of one sonnet. Limits, however, are not reassuring boundaries in On Malice;
Babstock’s poetry insists on presenting a disquieting image of our world in which
the limits—or poetic forms—that circumscribe human meaning and experience
are mechanical and fragmentary; his book both destroys and re-makes the relation
between form and content, all the while challenging the reader to “think of a good
reason not to quit listening” (24).

Christy Frost
19

Neville George

Nate Mosseau
20

The Pillars of Creation
Reaching with shattered hands, two lighted fingers,
to the eyes of nascent suns; they, like my
own two feet reach for the base of things. This
womb of dust, hung in the changings of the sky,
under the lenses of the earth is always
stiff; and when I see it, seven thousand
lights and years apart, it is already gone,
torn in bright winds that, scattered from dead stars,
colour the vaultless screen. How often
I have looked at you this way. How often I
have thought my heart was like this earth;
your eyes, the vanished light that held it fixed.
How little I know of the earth- how little of my heart.

â&#x20AC;&#x192;

James Dunnigan
21

Gary Gonejob
Gary was a lost fool of a mumbling stumbling generation. Nobody knew a
single word this guy said. It was all a mishmash of monosyllabic nonsense. I depended
on hand signals and pointing at things whenever he visited the pharmacy.
I never cared for the insults or street jargon applied to him. The guy didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t need
any more problems. The terminology the paternalistic people used made them feel
better but never improved his life or our understanding of his world.
Gary was a man-child who threw a pack of gum and a pack of condoms on the
counter and you wondered if he knew how to use either. I also wondered if he had any
money. Most times he was just given things for free to get him out of the way.
Ten minutes after I closed the pharmacy last night I heard Gary was hit by a car
while walking home from the park. They said his body flew like a paper airplane and
landed back first on the roof of a nearby car. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
His immediate family was pleasantly surprised when many visitors stopped
by the funeral and clipped pins on his casket of his favourite restaurants like Johnny
Rockets and Hard Rock CafĂŠ. Cards were left with hand-made images of his beloved
cartoon characters.
Gary left a note which was read by his father to a packed room. In the note,
Gary decried our need for war and our neglect of animals. He thanked the few people
that were kind to him. It was a very small list. None of his family was on that list.
Neither was I.
I really thought I measured better in his eyes. I really thought.

Mark Antony Rossi
22

Good Kid

Long Weekend

Campbell McClintock
23

Emergency Broadcast System
it always began:
This
is a test.
For the next sixty seconds, this
station will conduct
a test
of the Emergency
Broadcast System.
This is only
a test.
and then:
that tone
that shrillpiercing skinspeckling heartstopping tone
that frequency screeching:
thebombswillbefallingsoon!
yourskinwillbeliquified!
yourboneswillexplodeintoash!
boy, you will never
touch the flesh of a woman

boy, you will never
know true love

but then:
Broadcasters, in
cooperation with the FCC and
other authorities have
developed this system
to keep you informed
in the event
of an actual emergency.

Richard Scarsbrook
24

yet now:

you miss that familiar frequency
only crackling static

your heart stops beating

Richard Scarsbrook
25

And Dream Or Do Not Dream
I do not know the people in my building. There are many immigrants and a
few students. The neighbourhood is St. Henri. It is a poor neighbourhood, “up-andcoming.”
I am employed doing research at the university. It is boring. I am not a bad
employee. I am not a bad person—unsettled but not bad. I see little of the few
friends I have. They are either still in school or working elsewhere. It does not
matter. I am not a social person anyways. I prefer to be alone, I think.
On the metro a boy pretends to choke himself with his scarf. His tongue is
out of his mouth and he gasps for air. His mother is asleep. Her eyelids leak a thin
crack of white—her eyes are rolled up in her head.
I left my apartment to go spend the night at Cat’s place. Cat bothers me but
the sex is all right. I think about how I will fuck her tonight as the metro speeds
along. The air is scarce. I will pour myself into her—smother her.
People in the metro look at their phones and forget themselves in the mess
of limbs and sweaty, bag-like coats. They are piled in the metro. They are still and
silent.
I get to my stop and walk up the hill towards Cat’s place. She lives between
metro stops. I do not mind going to her place. She has a big bed.
Winter is cold in Montreal. Cars line the streets billowing exhaust into
the murky orange artificial light blazing in the evening. Walking up St. Laurent
you inhale mostly fumes. I try to get close to the cars so the exhaust spills out and
washes warmth over me. The smell of gasoline intoxicates me.
“What took you?”
“Am I late?”
“I’ve been waiting.”
“That’s okay.”
“I haven’t been doing anything.”
“Why?”
“I was waiting.”
“You should have done something.”
“Like what?”
Cat’s arms are folded across her chest. I hug her.
“What should I have done?”

Caleb Harrison
26

I walk into her bedroom. She follows. There is the bed. There is the mirror.
There is her desk and chair. I turn to Cat and bring her towards me. I kiss her. She
tosses her tongue into my mouth. It is limp and boring. She rubs her face against
mine.
Some time in the night I awaken, unable to breathe. The blanket is covering
my face. It smells like shit under there. Our bodies make awful smells in the night.
Every evening we decay. We are rotting and our beds are tombs.
I pull the blanket off and look at Cat. She is staring at me so intently I think
maybe she is asleep. She does not speak.
“Cat.”
No answer. I touch her face with my hand.
“Cat?”
She blinks and keeps staring. Her eyes are huge, terrified. She stares at me.
My heart beats heavily. I move away from her. She looks hateful or dead or both.
“Are you awake?” she says.
“What?”
“You’re awake.”
I push the blanket away and lay naked on the sheet. It is hot in her room.
Sleep is selfish, I think. You remove yourself from people. When you are asleep
you are no good to anyone but yourself. You still take up oxygen, you still take up
room—you may as well be a stinking corpse. I turn to Cat and see she is asleep or
pretending.
In the morning we say little. I shower. Drink in the hot steam. Cat makes me
breakfast and I go to work. The air is fresh and clean, it stings my lungs. I like the
sting. I want more. I breathe in as much of that air as I can on the walk to work. It is
inexhaustible.
At work I look out the window. The sun shines for the first hour and then the
sky becomes white and blank. There is no edge to it, no discernible cloud. There is
lightness to it, strange clarity. The white is not thick, not like fog.
The metro on the way home is packed again. It is difficult to breathe. People
are coughing, yawning. They emit that horrible stench within their guts, the mucous
and filth. There is moisture in the air. It clings to your face and plugs your pores so
you cannot catch a proper breath.
There are people outside my building. They are police officers. And
firefighters. And medics. The police stand around, talking. Some write things down.

Caleb Harrison
27

The firefighters shake their heads and listen to an old man read something. The
medics pile large black bags on the sidewalk in front of the building. They work in
pairs, straining to carry the bags. The bags come from inside the building. They are
body bags. Inside them are bodies.
A Puerto Rican man is face down on the ground in the snow convulsing as
two police officers speak to him and try to lift him. One officer shakes his head. I
approach him. He is drinking coffee.
“What happened?” I say.
A news team pulls up. And another. The officer watches the news teams as
they rush out of their vehicles, grabbing equipment. They race towards the group of
police officers who hold their belts and push out their chests, their faces down.
The officer looks back at me. He opens his mouth and moves it but no words
come out. The scene rushes around me. I hear nothing. I look at the bags piled
beside the building. I look below me. My stomach churns. My throat burns and fills,
erupting. I vomit frothy eggs all over the white snow. The Puerto Rican man rises.
“Gas leak,” the officer tells me.
He puts his arm around me and tries to lead me away from the scene. The
news teams corner the officers. They ask questions. One of them spots the Puerto
Rican man and runs over and shoves a microphone in his mouth.
The building looks the same as always but it seems quieter. The medics pile
the bags. There are many, all of them full. I did not know so many people lived in
there, in that little building. There are buildings like that everywhere in St. Henri,
in Montreal, in the world, where people sleep or do not sleep and dream or do not
dream.

Caleb Harrison
28

Untitled

Suki Faye
29

Nature’s Finest Lovers
I.
To all of you glorious people: the successful scented women
with warm, labial folds, so demure yet inviting, pink hairless
anuses, tasting only of clean skin; the muscular angular
self-made men, with seamless packages, magically wrinkle-free
foreskin peeling back to reveal the polished ruby of a glans,
atop a shaft so straight and regal it could be the scepter
of King Jesus himself. To all of you prime human specimens: why
must you limit yourselves? Why do you want only the martyr’s
missionary impositions? Sexual stasis, as if you were postanimal. The act performed. A perfunctory prayer before bed.
Some of us live our lives in jungles
of lust, spend whole seasons attacking and exploring one
another. We come away with blood on our snouts, infections
racing towards our hearts, our better halves –
the lower halves – teeming
with legions of bliss.
II.
Enough of the blind dumb ambition,
salmon-swimming, spawning
without penetration, only to die, barely
having touched. Lonely as people
online after dark, functionally
finishing themselves off, exhausted
after extended upstream office hours.
I prefer the passion of the unconcerned; the unemployed as ideal lovers. Time and inclination
to indulge. Someone who will enfold me
in the warmth of his girth, fat, slippery
tears rolling off his chin, down my shoulders
as I knead my fingers in the fur of his back.

D.W. Lee
30

III.
The sloth is natureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s finest lover. Dolphins
are playful enough, but too self-conscious
to fully give themselves over to the waves
of ecstatic confusion. North American
men will eat their partnersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; hearts
as a form of contraception. Their orgasms,
even the proud, multi-roped expulsions,
last only seconds; a pig orgasm may last
close to an hour.
After the luau, my lover
stuffed an apple in my mouth, tied
my hands and my feet, fucked me
bareback by the ocean, in plain view
of the sticky moon. Starlight dripping
oil on our salty skin.

D.W. Lee
31

Hibakusha (A-bomb survivors)
This is the dress I was wearing that day,
I was fourteen years old then
August 9, 1945, 11:02 a.m.
was a calm day, with no wind
pure white
roof tiles
bones of the dead
could not form the sound:
the atomic bomb dropped on top of us
the shadow where a child stood
the sun fallen out of the sky, old cedar hills,
close to Nakashima River where reeds were growing
all I could hear was the black rain falling
looking at the fireflies
with its houses gone
covered with mud and blood
in a pumpkin field hibakusha.
We, who have survived
walking along rice paddies
how small was Mount Inasa
on the island of Kyushu
which way was I supposed to go?
I remember the cicadas singing
but I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have my mother Sadako anymore
no clocks, no calendars.

Montréal-based writer Sean Michaels made headlines last year when he won
the Scotiabank Giller Prize for his debut novel Us Conductors. This year, he’s done it
again as a shortlisted nominee for the 2015 Amazon.ca First Novel Award.
Us Conductors is a fictionalized account of the life of Lev Termen, the Russian
scientist who invented the theremin, a musical instrument played without touch.
Termen travels to America, where he lives extravagantly before the market crash
and encounters his love interest Clara Rockmore. The story follows Termen back to
Russia, where he’s placed in a Gulag labour camp, all told in Michaels’ stylized prose
and captivating imagery.
Michaels is also the founder of the mp3 blog Said The Gramophone, and
he recently started a music column for the Globe and Mail. He’s won two National
Magazine Awards and is a jury member for the Polaris Music Prize. Scrivener Creative
Review editor Natalie Coffen had the pleasure of sitting down with him to talk about
his experience writing the novel, his life since winning the Giller, and his opinions
on journalism today.

What was the writing, editing and publishing process like?
It took a few years or more, including the editing process. I had written the book on
my own and then I worked with my agent to polish it. I have a writing group here so
they helped me with pieces of it as well. I’m represented by Random House Canada
and Tin House in the States, and at each publisher I had an editor, which could have
ended with two very different editions of the book. I love the input an editor has but
it’s an interesting process trying to harmonize and make one book out of two very
vocal, smart, insightful editors.
There’s quite a bit of scientific and historical detail in the novel. Was there a lot
of research involved?
I read books particularly about Gulag, Stalinist Russia and nightlife in New York
during the period the book is set in. The most important research for me came after
my first draft when I went to Russia and not only visited Saint Petersburg and
Moscow, but to the Kolyma region to a city called Magadan which features in the
book, which was where the largest concentration of Gulag work camps existed
during the 30s. I wanted to get a sense of what it was like out there, not to visit the
archives but to feel for myself what it was like to feel the sun going down in the
mountains or listen to the birds.

34

Did you find it restrictive, writing about historical events and real people?
I knew from the start I wasn’t trying to tell the real story, I was telling my own story
using what historical events were useful. Steven Galloway put it really well: “The job
of being a fiction writer is mostly making things up and the more historical facts you
use, the less you have to make up.” It’s this funny thing where I don’t need to make
up this person or event since it’s there in the history books for me to draw from.
Did you find it difficult sticking with one idea? As a writer, I find it difficult to
know which ideas are worth investing in. How did you handle this?
I don’t know if I knew. It’s a very big decision to set out to write a novel; I think
you can’t take it lightly. You have to choose a set of ideas that can sustain you
creatively for years. I also think that the single most difficult part of being an author
is finishing things. Starting things is super easy but finishing them is really hard, and
that’s one of the faculties you have to cultivate.
Did you find that your blog helped you with the publishing of your novel?
Said The Gramophone was really the springboard for my music criticism career. It
was, and continues to be, an incredible gym to kind of work through my routines
and practice for writing in general. In terms of the book, the blog helped me in some
cases to get publishers or agents to look at it. Ultimately when you’re selling a book,
it’s more than anything about the book. Especially as a first-time novelist, your
reputation can’t get you that far. It contributed more creatively to my process than
materially to the progression of the novel from manuscript to published work.
You manage to cover both scientific and spiritual aspects of music in your novel.
Are you a musician yourself?
I learned about music in school, but I’m not a musician. I learned clarinet and
recorder in grade school, I can read music, but no.
Were you listening to the theremin while writing Us Conductors?
I think that if you’re writing about a sound it helps to listen to that sound, but
sometimes it’s enough to imagine it. I almost always write to music. I was not
writing this book mainly to jazz from the 20s and 30s and classical music. I listened

35

to tonnes of modern music, music from America, Europe, Africa. I really like the idea
of different music disrupting the process of your imagination working; you’re busy
imagining a quiet, crystalline winter scene in Siberia and listening to some blues
from Mali or some pop from Detroit. I feel like that adds some interesting tension
and less stereotypical colours to the scene.
Have you tried playing the theremin before?
I now own two. I’m a rank amateur, I found it much harder than I even expected.
Did you see yourself in any of the characters?
I think in all of the characters. I mean, you try to see the world through their eyes
at least for a moment. I think one of the main exceptions is Clara. Lev makes some
huge mistakes from his misinterpreting what’s inside of her heart. For me it was
important that the reader’s perspective of Clara be similar to that, rather than
knowing what she was really thinking and feeling.
What are the main differences in writing fiction and nonfiction for you
personally?
I like to write my nonfiction from a similar place that I write my fiction. I’m someone
who really likes stylized prose, image, metaphor and all that poetic junk. I like
creative nonfiction that feels personal and you can sense the author’s spirit in the
words on the page or screen. I think we understate the impact of money and labour
on writers and so it’s much easier to get compensated in some flimsy way for writing
nonfiction. Fiction is very hard to get compensated for; you have to write a whole
book before you can sell it. When you’re writing fiction you’ve got to be doing it for
reasons other than just paying your rent and keeping a roof over your head. You have
to have something you want to stress or take pleasure in the craft. I think there’s a
very big difference in the motivations to do it and the things you have to hold in your
heart while doing it.
A month ago on Twitter you praised Rookie magazine as “the bravest site in the
entire world.” As a prominent Canadian writer, what direction do you think
journalism or even literature should be headed in?
I think all people in the industrialized world need to get real about the need to pay

36

for writing. There’s going to have to be some kind of shift where we start paying
for it again or else it’s going to go away. I feel that suddenly we’re at this wonderful
tipping point where enough people have grown up with the Internet that the
systemic barriers to entry work much less. People can just get their work directly
out into the world and writers from visible minorities, women, trans, voices that
aren’t me, suddenly realize, wait, I can do this just as well as they can. It’s suddenly
woken up the market to the power, accessibility and presence of these voices and
it’s this great opportunity now for the people who are on the inside, who have
this power to break down these unjust systems and make our newspapers and
magazines much more diverse and representative.
Jonathan Kay, Editor-in-Chief of The Walrus, spoke last week at McGill, and he
mentioned something similar about the lack of diversity in journalism being a
systemic problem.
I think Jonathan Kay doesn’t acknowledge that when we’re having conversations
about lack of diversity in the press, we’re not talking about why is it just looking
wayward, what we’re saying is, what can we do to change this? I think that by
putting everything in this unchangeable “oh income inequality, that’s why I won’t
hire more women or non-white people in the coming year” is nonsense. I really
believe that we can do better at deliberately trying to make these places more
representative and diverse and by deliberately making those changes and standing
up to an unjust system and changing it in a more proactive way instead of just
bemoaning, “Oh, we’re trapped in an unjust patriarchy, that’s life.” No, let’s start
fucking with that. In fact the work is already started, get on board.
What’s your advice to young aspiring writers?
Start things and finish them. If you really want to be a writer, be smart about the
way that you spend money and the things you spend money on. Try to understand
that you’re not going into this line of work to be able to load up at Costco on 24
packs of Crispers, you’re going into this work for the way that it sustains you every
day and inspires you to write a thousand words and feel like you’ve accomplished
something magical. So yeah, stay in Montréal, keep your finances in order, be
conscious, be deliberate, and don’t slide into a lifestyle that you can’t support.

37

What are you currently working on?
I’m working on a new book and lots of new opportunities have appeared since
the Giller. I have a new column in the Globe and Mail on Saturdays writing about
music. Because of this window where I’m allowed to do whatever I want ‘cause I’m
momentarily famous before I shuffle back into obscurity, I like the idea of taking
that opportunity to experiment with the ways we can do music criticism in a daily
newspaper and try to push the form a little bit, and I hope that I get to keep doing
that.
What writers are you into or have influenced you?
My biggest influences are all dudes, which is something that I’ve been interrogating
recently, but they are Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, J.R.R. Tolkien and F. Scott
Fitzgerald. They’re all magical writers in different ways. Today: David Bezmozgis,
he has such a wonderfully brutal, curt style, which is very different from the way
I write so I’m finding it fascinating. Also Rookie, the Hairpin and the Awl, a lot of
these places with often younger writers who don’t seem hamstrung by the same
responsibilities and systems. It’s really neat to feel like something’s scrambling the
system and we get to read as the scrambles figure out how to take over.
What was your time at McGill like?
My time at McGill was really four years learning to be a little bit of a grown-up in
Montréal. I moved from Ottawa. What I gained most from McGill was that it was
sited here and I loved being introduced to all this thinky stuff, it really did it for me.
I’m very grateful to the university for that.
While you were studying, did you know you wanted to be a writer?
I knew I wanted to be a fiction writer for sure. I never really thought that I’d be
paying my way as a music journalist. I took the one fiction workshop at McGill.
Why did you choose Montréal as your base?
I love being in a city where, particularly the community that I’m a part of in the
Mile-End, I’m living among so many artists who are all struggling. I don’t mean
struggling to succeed, but I mean that they’re not just taking jobs at advertising

38

firms and editorial jobs at newspapers. It’s so inspiring and sustaining to feel like
there’s a community of people like you who are just fighting through, particularly
when you cross the line into your late 20s and 30s where a lot of people start giving
up. Montréal’s full of those people who are secure and while the Giller makes me feel
secure, even before that I didn’t feel insecure in my life choices.
Since winning the Giller Prize, what’s been the most surreal thing to happen?
Being recognized on the street and in foreign cities. As a writer, you assume that will
never happen to you. You realize that Can Lit is this powerful enough cultural force
here and there’s this tiny sliver of the population that actually might recognize your
face; that’s bewildering and surreal.

Natalie Coffen & Sean Michaels
39

Nowhereness
(selection from series)
Photos by Isaac Applebaum

Flexi Curl Deposit Box

Margie Kelk
40

Nowhereness Village

Margie Kelk
41

Nowhereness Keyboard

Margie Kelk
42

Nowhereness iPads

Margie Kelk
43

Review of Jeramy Dodds’ The Poetic Edda
(Coach House Books, 2014)
One day a young C.S. Lewis casually flipped to Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow’s Tegner’s Drapa and read these words:
I heard a voice that cried,
Balder the beautiful
Is dead, is dead— (Lewis 17).
The pleasure of reading these lines was quite different from other pleasures
he had experienced, more “like a voice from far more distant regions….” In his
autobiography, Lewis described his first reading of Norse saga: “I knew nothing
about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I
desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be…” (17). This “Pure
Northernness,” filled out with Wagner’s Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods, would
come to engulf Lewis with its “vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the
Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity…” (Lewis
73).
Lewis is only one of many who have been captured by that sense of
Northernness. Even more influential, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth legendarium and
numerous characters in the Marvel Universe find their origin in Norse mythology.
The influence is obvious for the latter, as Thor, Odin, and Loki are feature characters
in a new generation of videographical storytelling. Within the evocative mindscapes
of Middle Earth, however, the influence is less obvious. Dwarves are common fare
in fantasy, and we might know that Tolkien’s elves, transformed as they are, evoke
the Norse realms of Alfheim and Svartalfheim (Elfland and Dark Elfland, captured as
Lios Alfar and Svart Alfar in Canadian Tolkien editor and fantasy writer Guy Gavriel
Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry).
When we move to The Poetic Edda—one of Norse mythology’s key texts—we
see immediately how Tolkien was drawn into the old Nordic speculative universe.
Only eleven stanzas into the first poem, the influence of the Edda on Tolkien is
obvious:
11. Nyi and Nidi, Nordri, …
Althjof, Dwalin, Nar and Nain,
Niping, Dain, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur,
Nori, An and Onar, Ai, Mjothvitnit,

Brenton D. G. Dickieson
44

12. Vigg and Gandalf, Vindalf, Thrain
Thekk and Thorin, Thror, Vit and Lit …
13. Fili, Kili, Fundin, Nali….
And the list continues. While not the greatest example of the work’s poetic quality,
this list from Jeramy Dodds’ new translation of The Poetic Edda demonstrates how
very important this oft-neglected medieval text is. The Eddic poems are “invaluable
primary sources on early Nordic mythology and heroic legend” (Dodds 8). Their
mythological and historical value, as well as their contemporary influence, warrant
translations for new generations of readers. Award-winning Canadian poet Jeramy
Dodds has indeed provided a fresh translation, vivid and accessible, a skillful
combination of the closeness of the text with the remote wilderness of the world
that birthed it.
As Dodds explains in his “Introduction,” The Poetic Edda is made up of
“oral pagan poems, passed mouth to ear for centuries, until they were flash-frozen
onto vellum sometime around 1270 by Christian monks in Iceland” (12). Dodds’
translation aims at a precise method of thawing this text so that it exposes the
culturally bound mythology that the Edda encapsulates.
In particular, Dodds has aimed for accessibility. Indeed, his translation is
shockingly fresh, drawing out images heretofore buried in previous translations that
obscured the meaning. At other points, Dodds chooses a voice in his interpretation
that reshapes the poem.
A side-by-side comparison of one of the poems will show the value and
limitations of Dodds’ translation. Below are several stanzas of “Loki’s Flyting,” or
“Lokasenna” in some editions. In the left-hand column is Henry Adams Bellows’
traditional translation. At the opening of the poem, we see how Bellows captures the
majesty of a formal interlocutor calling for a tale. Dodds takes a different approach
with subtle shifts in translation.
1. “Speak now, Eldir, | for not one step
Farther shalt thou fare;
What ale-talk here | do they have within,
The sons of the glorious gods?”

1. ‘Eldir, before you take another
step, tell me, what do those sons
of the Triumph Gods have
going on inside as far as ale-talk?’

The syntax is clearer in Dodds’ translation, and he leaves behind Bellows’ alliterative
“glorious gods” for a categorical refinement: the Triumph Gods. Each translator
captures the Edda’s propensity for compound words with “ale-talk.” Overall, the
translations are quite similar.

Brenton D. G. Dickieson
45

Throughout the poem Dodds chooses a far more colloquial approach—even
more than the updating of English for this decade. In Loki’s taunt of the gods below,
Dodds leaves behind Bellows’ Shepherd Psalm echo with the colloquialism “fetch me
a seat.” As well, “bid me forth to fare” is far different in tone than Dodds’ “tell me to
clear off.”
[Loki]
7. “Why sit ye silent, | swollen with pride,
Ye gods, and no answer give?
At your feast a place | and a seat prepare me,
Or bid me forth to fare.”

7. ‘Why so silent, you haughty gods,
have you nothing to say to me?
Fetch me a seat here at your feast
or tell me to clear off.’

As the poem continues, Bellows’ evocative translation heightens the battle of wits,
while Dodds’ translation allows the conversation to take on the personality of a
rap battle. “Mad art thou” is the formal equivalent of “you’re a lunatic,” and Dodds
restores alliteration with the street insult, “your wits are out of whack.”
Othin spake:
21. “Mad art thou, Loki, | and little of wit,
The wrath of Gefjun to rouse;
For the fate that is set | for all she sees,
Even as I, methinks.”

Odin said
21. ‘Loki, you’re a lunatic – your wits
are out of whack if you want Gefjon
as an enemy, for she can foresee
the world’s future as well as I can.’

Both are better than Lee Hollander’s “Bereft of reason and raving thou art”; Bellows
evokes the poetic past without becoming archaic, while Dodds draws the text
very close to the speech of the television generation. As the insults continue, three
stanzas heighten the difference between the two philosophies of translation.
Freyja spake:
31. “False is thy tongue, |
and soon shalt thou find
That it sings thee an evil song;
The gods are wroth, | and the goddesses all,
And in grief shalt thou homeward go.”

Freyja said:
31. ‘Your tongue’s cutting,
I’m sure
one day it’ll flail you to pieces.
The Æsir and the Asynjor are livid
with you. You’ll go home unhappy.’

Loki said:
32. ‘Shut up, Freyja, you’re riddled with
wickedness, a real witch. The giggling
gods walked in on you

Brenton D. G. Dickieson
46

the bright gods caught thee
When Freyja her wind set free.”

riding your own
brother, Freyja, and then you farted.’

Njorth spake:
33. “Small ill does it work |
though a woman may have
A lord or a lover or both;
But a wonder it is | that this womanish god
Comes hither, though babes he has borne.”

Njord said:
33. ‘Who cares if a
woman takes lovers
with or without her husband? Odd, though,
how a cock-gobbling god like you
got in here after birthing his own babes

Note the punning contrasts in Freyja’s speech. For Bellows, “tongue” leads to “evil
song,” which opens up to wrath and grief. Dodds heightens the pun—a “cutting
tongue … flails to pieces”—but loses the transumptive power. From “flailing” Dodds
moves to “livid” as the contemporary of “wrath.” While “livid” has metaphorical
possibilities, they leave behind “cut to pieces” for new rigidity. Certainly, “And in
grief shalt thou homeward go” is an archaism. But if Dodds had finished the stanza,
“You’ll go home in grief,” he would have recovered consonance while capturing the
idea of “gravity”—etymologically connected with “grief”—that may strengthen
lividity. Or perhaps a crimson frown would contrast the giggling gods’ bluish
countenance.
Bellows’ nostalgic poetry is as intentional as Dodds’ kitchen table prosein-verse. In Bellows’ 1930s, “said” or “spoke” were the common translation for the
Old Icelandic kvað. However, “spake” helped evoke the poetic atmosphere Bellows
desired—Tolkien or Lewis might have done the same. Certainly Bellows’ translation
is more elevated, but in stanzas 32 and 33, Dodds demonstrates the poignancy
and humour in a far more immediate way. While “thou foulest witch” has a poetic
elegance lacking in “a real witch,” the immediacy of “Shut up, Freyja” has its own
poignancy. Hear it as prose from the trickster Loki’s mouth: “The giggling gods
walked in on you riding your own brother, Freyja, and then you farted.” While I
wish Dodds risked some exclamation marks, if we recall the ale-house scenery, we
can imagine hundreds of horns raised in salute at the insult. Moreover, Dodds has
recaptured the original frata, obscured in Bellows’ translation, which is marvellously
paired in a verbal pun with Freyja in the original text. At the charge of incest,
the double-wronged Njörð—father of Freyja and her purported lover-brother—
castrates and impregnates the grinning god-son Loki, accusing him not simply
of homoerotic desire, or even of passivity in that pairing. Instead, Loki’s lack of
manhood turns scrotum to womb, god to goddess.
Doubtless Bellows’ is a stronger piece of poetry than Dodds’ storytelling

Brenton D. G. Dickieson
47

form in these examples. There were times when I yearned for the archaic poetry over
the vulgar prose, especially in the heroic tales, which seem to me to plod on with
too little diversity in style. Dodds’ translation, however, brings us to the immediacy
of the language. There is little incomprehensible in Dodds’ Edda. In this way Dodds’
Edda is the J.B. Phillips translation of Norse poetics, the Living Bible of The Poetic
Edda. Yet, it is not the Edda for dummies. For all Dodds aims at today’s language,
he retains the Æsir and the Asynjor, intentionally creating distance for the reader:
while the language is close to us, the world is not. What is lost in atmosphere—
the Northernness that Tolkien and Lewis longed for—is gained in the reader’s
contextual understanding of this distant world.
This tightrope walk leads to some obscurity about who the intended reader
truly is. The translation is easy to read, colloquial, and evocative; the introduction is
basic, informative, and designed to intrigue. The index cleverly combines definitions
with topical cross-sections, doing one of the jobs we would expect of footnotes that
are absent in this text. Everything but the text slips away, with open fields of white
space for the reader’s notes. One would presume, then, that non-professional readers
are in view. An academic audience would demand text critical notes and a research
review.
Yet there are challenges for the lay reader too. For contemporary ears
trained in the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare, or the rhymes of Dr. Seuss, hip
hop, greeting cards, limericks, and pop music, Old Icelandic poetry is going to be a
stumbling block in its very form. Even those familiar with the medieval-evocative
poetry of Lewis and Tolkien, or the new streams of modern poetry opened by T.S.
Eliot, are going to find the poetry itself to be strange. It simply lacks the metrical
diversity or baseline rhythms we know in English poetry. Dodds’ dependence
on alliteration is light, bucking trends of heavy consonance in verse translation
and initial rhyming, such as the tendencies of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
translators J.R.R. Tolkien and Simon Armitage, or Hollander’s Edda. While heavy
alliteration can cause the contemporary reader to flounder, since The Poetic Edda is so
inspirational to subsequent poets I still wonder if more of that initial rhyming could
have been kept.
While Dodds’ translation is meant to be an Edda Vulgate, some of the
word choices are strange to the ear. The choice of “ninny” as the translation of ósnotr
instead of the more classic and intertextually rich “fool” is very odd. If Dodds wanted
to strip away the temptations to archaic language, he could have used “loser.”
“Ninny” strikes me as an after-school special word from the last century. But Dodds
himself does not shrink from the offensive. Homophobic slurs and gender-bending
insults are kept throughout his Edda. Particularly interesting is his translation,
“cock-gobbler.” While this is a creative rendering, we have in North American

Brenton D. G. Dickieson
48

English a popular slur—“cocksucker”—that would do just as well without the
oddness. It may be that these two examples of “ninny” and “cock-gobbler” began as
alliterative choices; if so, however, I cannot discern the pattern.
Besides these small translational quibbles, there is one aspect of the
introduction that is missing for the intelligent, nonprofessional reader. Besides those
traditions mentioned above—myth and mythology, poetry, and Nordic-soaked
fantasy like J.R.R. Tolkien or Guy Gavriel Kay—the other stream of readers will
be those who encountered the Halls of Valhalla through comic books and their
film interpretations. When my ten-year-old saw I was reading the Edda, he quickly
snatched it away from me and pored over the spatial geography of Yggdrasil. No
one would argue that the introduction should be written for preteens—my son
got lost in the introduction—but this particular reader represents a significant
part of popular culture that encounters Thor, Odin, Loki, and the Frost Giants
in a particular stylized context. These sorts of readers are often encyclopedic
in their understanding of what they think of as “Norse mythology.” I think this
particular introduction, aimed at the new reader, would have benefitted from a
brief conversation that redefines Loki and the Jotuns in the Edda with the Marvel
Universe in mind.
This detailed consideration contains few criticisms that stack up against
the sheer freshness and creativity of this new translation. The introduction is
excellent in what it covers, the family trees and map of Yggdrasil are essential, and
an index-glossary is an elegant use of space. The university student or lover of poetry
and myth will find this translation both engaging and approachable. Considering the
too few paths to the Northern climes of Yggdrasil, this is by far the easiest for new
pilgrims. A professional can add this translation to his or her resources in viewing
the text from a new angle and reading it afresh. It is a beautifully produced book, a
relevant and long-needed translation, and an opportunity for a new generation of
readers to find their way to the imaginative landscapes of The Poetic Edda. That it is
completed by a Canadian poet who is so young and yet so accomplished makes it a
notable moment.
Works Cited
Bellows, Henry Adams, trans. The Poetic Edda: Translated from the Icelandic with an
Introduction and Notes. New York: Princeton University Press, 1936.
Dodds, Jeramy, trans. The Poetic Edda. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2014.
Hollander, Lee M., trans. The Poetic Edda. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1962.
Kay, Guy Gavriel. The Fionavar Tapestry. Toronto: Harper Perennial Canada, 1995.
Lewis, C.S. Surprised by Joy. Princeton: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1955.

Brenton D. G. Dickieson
49

Day Swim

Campbell McClintock
50

Night Swim

Campbell McClintock
51

Upon the gutting of live carp for a Polish
client
ζάτει τὸν σάρκινον ἰχθύν,
εἰ γάρ πᾳ κνώσσων ἔτ᾽ ἐτώσια ταῦτα ματεύσεις,
μὴ σὺ θάνῃς λιμῷ καίτοι χρυσοῖσιν ὀνείροις.
-Theocritus, Idylls 25
The roe of the dead sits
trembling in my hand.
A hand not stiff enough
to hold the possibilities
of what each egg and drip
of battered tissue might have served
inside that cavern of the body, where
assembling as at fireside,
near where the heart perspires, may have coursed
much larger thoughts,
the way that sage of old
turning his eye toward the sun
(knife in the belly of his world), beheld
the skinless surface of the earth,
the organs of the sky;
his life, digested into darkness.
In this deep world
where shadow clots like blood
over the blinded eye, birth is a gutting,
and death is hollow and childless
and home is but a wide-mouthed sea
lipped with long hooks and closing nets,
where air is water
and the water, molten salt
from quarried stone.

James Dunnigan
52

Deep world of shattered ribs,
where even I have cut myself
-three stitches on my hand,
three more beneath: a wound
to hide another, deeper wound
In this deep world,
my soul is but a scratch,
pulled by a passing nail
not even for convenience.
In this deep world,
my fingers on the blade,
my eyes upon my hands, I am a scar.
I am a scar. The whole world heals without me.

James Dunnigan
53

Family Ties
Now behind me, home
sinks shuttered in amber, the debris
enclosed by a deep golden drop.
It’s so long ago

it must be beautiful,

her mouth open, my mother floats
on the brown sofa for her afternoon nap.
A kind of spell I performed
by growing up
so well
a reverse fairy tale, no charmed sleep
for the young,
only the long evening
when my parents settle gently into the past
like silt coating the lake bed.
And still I am not exactly sure
what happened,
anchor up,
my small dingy suspended on the water’s flat surface.
My parents’ calm faces stare up
through murky water,
a string of bubbles nuzzling
between my father’s lips.
This is one way to relate.
The brisk wind lifts
damp hair off my neck.
Leaning over the lake
I gaze down only
where my shadow
cuts the sun’s refracted shine.

Christy Frost
54

Linear Bee. dOyc98tV5kA
(Park Sanssouci, August 2011)

Daniel Galef
55

Portland Street Sketches
1.
Wayne pawned his mandolin yesterday and bought a quart of white rum
and a twenny pack of Pall Mall Bolds—I know he did. I conveniently went out to
the stoop for a dart as he was coming around the corner with the mandolin over his
shoulder. I laughed and asked him if he was bringing it to work—imagining him in
the dishpit playing Carter Family songs covered in oil and fish batter. He said quite
casually that he was tryin to pawn it. He had white spit in the corner of his mouth
and didn’t look pleased with anything. I told him not to do that. He said he needed
money. At this point he doesn’t have anything left that he doesn’t want so he’s
reduced to selling prized possessions. I was panicked. I fuckin love that Mandolin.
I love that we have it in our band and I love the songs we play that require it. Now
he’s going off to pawn it for very little as if it’s no big deal? I told him again not to
do that and he said he’d get a pawn ticket and try and hold it till the 23rd, which
I assumed was when his pay check was coming. I told him it was a stupid idea.
“I know,” he said, “but I need money.” “What’re you gonna spend it on,” I asked,
“cigarettes and booze?” He didn’t answer and just told me not to tell anybody and
kept walkin—bitter and defeated. I wished he hadn’t told me.
2.
People pass by my apartment door day and night. Folks coming to and from
work or going to the Laundromat. Crackheads and drunks, the two pimps and the
five whores, the small business owners, the residents, and the beat cop with the
Russian hat. Some are regulars and some aren’t. Some say hello and some don’t. Some
have missing teeth. Some have limps and dirty clothes and others have suits and
Blackberries.
The little drunken curmudgeon who waddles to the store in his torn orange
boxers.
The VLT darlings who come out to smoke on occasion. The tall blonde lady
well into her fifties with the cute little dog, the middle-aged Asian lady with the
pony tail....
We don’t all know each other’s names but I see them when I smoke or look
out my living room window. I see white and black and Lebanese. I see sadness,
drunkenness. I see young and old, happy and sour, tattoos and motorcycles. I hear
laughter and hollers and sirens.

Dylan Jewers
56

3.
Living across the street from a motorcycle club........
Sometimes it’s loud but mostly it’s just funny. They have black leather vests
with their logo on the back. They’re all men. They’re all tattooed, gruff, battered and
ugly. Most of them are over forty. The club is in the basement of the building. They
have a store in the room that leads from the sidewalk. They sell biker shit. Leather.
This middle-aged ginger woman tends to it. She smokes a lot. In the window there is
a T-shirt with the number 81 on the back of it. H is the 8th letter in the alphabet. A
is the 1st. 81. HA. Hell’s Angels. (The Halifax Chapter of the Angels was shut down
in 2001 by the RCMP, but still.) It’s hard to say whether or not they’re cutthroats.
But I’m more afraid of the big black pimp that works on my block. Ten feet from my
stoop. He reminds me of a bull. His moustache and big lips. His broad shoulders and
dead fucking eyes. But the bikers pose no public threat. They probably have guns
but I’ve never seen them. It’s hard to know how they’ve assessed me.
4.
There’s this Caribbean dude on the block with mass amounts of gall. He asks
for smokes like you have the words “FREE SMOKES” written on your chest in big
neon letters. Then after you give him one he immediately asks for another. “Two?
Can I get two smokes, mon?”
He bums change in the same fashion. “Eh, you got a loonie?” “You got two
bucks?” Very proper. Very matter of fact and without a lick of shame or nervousness.
No sympathy. He walks with a purpose. He has the same casually determined face
every time he passes me on the stoop. He must be in his 30s. Average height and
build. Boring, well fitted clothing and knock-off running shoes. “You got a smoke?”
“You got two smokes?” “You gotta toonie, mon?”
5.
Joey’s always smoking outside his pub with a cup of coffee and a worried air
about him. He must smoke about 2 packs a day on top of 6-8 pots of Nabob—black.
He’s fifty something. Lebanese. Crazy-eyed—almost murderous. Big teeth, salt and
pepper goatee and a gold chain around his neck. He told me once that he’s been
in Dartmouth since ’71 but his accent is still thick. He talks too fast and it’s hard
making him out. I miss at least a quarter of what he says every time we speak, but
he’s a pretty nice guy. He lets us play his pub every week. But that has its own set of
problems. He’s always bitching to me about the shows. Either he’s on me about the
attendance being low, or the gear not getting packed up and put away after every
show, or the fact that he’s losing business when people are up in my apartment

Dylan Jewers
57

drinking between sets and not buying his five dollar Labatt Blue. I never know what
to say to him. He’s never satisfied. Sometimes I wonder if he just likes complaining.
He must, because he doesn’t do anything to keep any of those problems from
happening. He knows nothing about promotion or music or any of that shit. But he
lets us play every week anyway, so fuck it. I just wish I could pass by him once, on
my way to the ferry or the pizza place or the chip truck, without getting an earful.
6.
Aaron strolls by the stoop almost every day. He’s in his mid-thirties, tall,
dark, and looks like a skinny Rodney Dangerfield, a straight Frank O’Hara. He has
a hair lip and bug eyes. His nose is busted from a motorcycle accident he had years
back in Korea. He taught English there after he finished his degree at King’s College
in Halifax. He lives in the grey apt building behind Joey’s Pub. I met him there one
Friday a few years back while he was campaigning for the Liberal Party and passing
out pins, spreading the holy word of Mayor elect Mike Savage (now the mayor of
Halifax). Aaron is a smart dude. He’s funny. He’s been around. An old school HRM
hipster. He was around for the first few years of the Halifax Pop Explosion music
festival, saw Eric’s Trip during the Love Tara days, and used to drum in what he has
referred to as “one of Dartmouth’s loudest bands.”
These days, he’s on stress leave from his job at the bank, and spends his
time reading, getting coffee, smoking king-size cigarettes and bumming around
Portland. I can see him one day writing The Great Canadian Novel, if he hasn’t done
so already.
7.
The Sun Sun Cafe was a Chinese restaurant down at the end of the strip. It
closed a few years ago. I used to eat there when I began hanging downtown. It was
cheap and fairly tasty and almost always empty. The owners (an old Chinese couple)
were always in the back corner playing cards and drinking Chinese beer. Sam’s Bar,
right next door, used to be a funeral home. The beer fridge is an old corpse fridge.
They sell three dollar drinks and have one of those new, touch screen jukeboxes.
Barry drinks there almost every night.
Barry runs a book stand at the market, further up the road. He doesn’t have
that great a selection, and he doesn’t sell many books. He’s American. New York.
Queens. He told me once that he moved to Nova Scotia in the 80s, and ended up in
Dartmouth in the early 2000s.
“Anything ya want. Your credit’s good.”
“Nah, I’m just browsin, Barry.”

Dylan Jewers
58

“Do ya like History? I got some terrific stuff on the French Revolution.”
He’s got that New York voice. That beautiful accident you hear in movies.
I like hearing him speak. Wondering every time, why in the fuck someone would
leave New York City for Dartmouth Nova Scotia.
8.
Today I watched an old drunk square off with a telephone pole. He gave up
after it refused to fight back and he staggered down the block and passed out on the
bench outside the May Garden Chinese restaurant.
There were police and paramedics down the block yesterday around this
time. I got the scoop from Joey this morning. From what I could make out, he said
one of the crackwhores robbed the Subway with a knife. Not the cash, just a sub and
some chips. She lives above it. The Subway employees know she lives above them, so
they called the cops and told them they could find her there. When they knocked on
her door she jumped out the window and broke her leg. “Stupid fuckin bitch,” Joey
said, laughing.
The cops are out here every day. They circle the strip in their cars, or they
walk from one end to the other. They are out here every day and the pimps still
pimp, the whores still whore, the crackheads bumble down the street, the bikers
hang their flags in the window and the drunks fight the telephone poles. There have
been times where I’ve considered asking them why that is. “Hey officer, you know
what goes on down here? You must, you’re out here every day. So I ask ya: why do
you think they continue to do what they do?”
I doubt I’ll bother. They probably wouldn’t like the criticism. I’ve never had
to speak to a cop and I’d like to keep it that way.
9.
Few doors down, towards the harbour, there’s a diner which hasn’t been
open for business in close to fifteen years. The stools are still at the counter. Upstairs
there’s an apartment. The building belongs to an old Italian man. The building looks
much like the others on my block; slanted, stout, one storey tall from the early 1900s
with white wood panelling and red brick. I don’t know his name, the old Italian
man. He lives in the building. He lives in the apartment upstairs. He used to run the
diner but shut it down. He still hasn’t left the property. He makes wine. The back
wall of the building is covered in grape vines. He goes for a bike ride every day. In the
summer time you’ll see him riding around Dartmouth in a wifebeater, shorts, helmet,
and Sobey’s bags on both handles. He sits in the window of the diner with a cup of
coffee and watches Portland Street. He waves at people. He smiles at people.

Dylan Jewers
59

I was on the stoop one night having a smoke and some dude came walking
down from the harbour and stopped for a sec at the old man’s building. When he got
to me, after having ignored him for close to ten seconds or so, he looked at me and
said,
“Excuse me, man, but, umm, do you know if there’s a ghost down there?”
“Where?”
“I was just walking by and I swore I saw some old guy in the window, but
I’m wondering if I’m crazy.”
I was laughing. He wasn’t.
“Nah, man. That guy lives there.”
“Oh thank fuck.”
“Yeah. He sits there all the time.”
“Jesus Christ, man. Trippy. I thought I’d fuckin lost it.”
Stoned and lonely, I proceeded to tell the dude all I knew about the old
Italian man in the window.

Dylan Jewers
60

Mundane Mondays

JNV Photography
61

Agonized Google Scenes
Painstaking research went into the diary, as expected,
and its production alienated the rest of the family,
sharing the wood-paneled bungalow uneasily.
Under close analysis it became a contrast between
dominant laughter and a solo â&#x20AC;&#x153;stop staringâ&#x20AC;? mode.
A small shift in the paradigm untaps the real dream.
Invitational oppositions fill up the glass suggestion bowl.
Everyone is here to watch the sister pluck her harp.
If they ignite with laughter consider it an affirmation:
or an irreconcilable conflict with the reality principle.
Civilization depends on distractions generated
to suppress glandular flare-ups. If the sister
ditched her apathetic picking for real pleasure,
we would marshal holy pressures to suppress it,
and open the door to a limited Catholic penance.

Sam Difalco
62

Speckled Elder
My grandfather is a common species in this town.
At sea level,
in forests,
abandoned fields
and lakeshores,
he rocks back and forth
softly,
to not trouble
his deep roots and
grey bark.
Spotted with neglect,
somewhat pale – of little value.
At 11:15 every weekday: the death notices on the radio.
My grandfather tells me he listens,
to see if he’s died yet.
We chuckle.

Clara Lagacé
63

The Mathematics of Being Known
I don’t know how to get there.
The bus number is somewhere between one and one hundred, the street has a name, the
house another number. I don’t know what these numbers measure of when we started
counting or why some things get numbers while other things get names. But I do know
that my getting there is a matter of time and that time is the conversation between this
movement and the next.
They are waiting for me there.
They are waiting for me at the end of this equation like the dot at the end of the
sentence. They are drinking from cups or bottles or nothing at all if they have to spare the
dark of tonight for the light of tomorrow. There is music in the air about them but no one
holds it, no one hears it. The music only helps to pass the pauses in the stories we tell
each other; stories about who we are, what we’re not and how we hope to be. Instruments
carry our voices where we never could. The possibility of dancing stands still in their
peripheral.
Now I am almost close enough to being far away from not being there. I rode the
number, recognized the name, walked counting down the street until it all added up to the
knock, then, the answer.
When I walk through the door I’ll arrive like a new season.
They will ask me for my names and for my numbers and with some help from the cups
and from the music, I’ll tell them.
Then they’ll know that the person in front of them is the sum of all his wandering.
Then they’ll know how to find me.

Judah Schulte
64

Windward

Nate Mosseau
65

contributors
Dominique Bernier-Cormier
is a poet from Montréal. He is
currently pursuing an MFA in
Creative Writing at UBC, where
he is the poetry editor at PRISM
international. He loves to drink
beer, and also loves cancelling plans
to go hiking early in the morning.

Sam Difalco
lives and works in Toronto. His
novel Mean Season will be out in
autumn 2015 from Mansfield
Press.
James Dunnigan
is an emerging writer of fiction
and poetry, practising fishmonger
and student at McGill University.
His work, in English and French,
has appeared in The Montréal
Review and The Veg, and in 2014,
his short story “Open Bay” won
him second prize in the Québec
Writing Competition. He has
recently completed the manuscript
for a novel and a book of short
stories, both of which he is looking
to publish. When not obsessing
over the state of the cosmos, he
can generally be found roaming
the streets of Montréal with his
buddy Dom, pretending to speak
Latin.

Ivanna Besenovsky
is an almond croissant.
Brenton D. G. Dickieson
teaches at the Centre of Christianity
and Culture at the University
of
Prince Edward Island.
Curator of the popular fantasy,
faith, and fiction blog, www.
aPilgrimInNarnia.com, Brenton
is working on a PhD in theology
and literature at the University of
Chester.
JNV Photography
is a part-time travelling photographer and a part-time McGill English Literature student.

Caleb Harrison
is from Yellowknife, Northwest
Territories.

66

Miguel Eichelberger
writes out of Vancouver, Canada
with his authoress wife. He travels,
hits pucks with sticks, kicks balls
with feet (soccer and other), and is
a happily bewildered father of two
tiny lunatics. His poetry has appeared in literary magazines such as
Vancouver Review as issue #27’s feature poet, OCW Magazine (Canada),
Kindling (US), five issues of the Poetic
Pinup Revue (US), Existere (Canada),
The Resurrectionist (UK), Chrysalis
(Canada), Buttontapper (US), San
Diego State University’s pacificREVIEW, Indiana University’s From The
Well House and most recently in In
My Bed Magazine and Joypuke.
Suki Faye
currently studies in Vancouver,
British Columbia. She hopes to
one day live in a small cabin nestled
somewhere in the woods.
Dylan Jewers
is a writer from Dartmouth, Nova
Scotia. He has been published in The
Brooklyn Voice and BareBackLit.

67

Christy Frost
is from Montréal, Quebec. Her
poetry has appeared previously
in Steps, The McGill Daily’s Literary
Supplement, and Ditch Poetry.
Daniel Galef
is a student at McGill University.
This is entry number thirteen of
aleph-null in Operation Azimov.

Margie Kelk
is a Toronto-based visual artist
whose artistic practice reflects
contemporary concerns about
cultural history and politics. She
appropriates and reconstructs
visual fragments of ideas through
diverse artistic media that include
ceramic sculpture, installation,
drawing and painting, animation
and photography. She has been
showing in Canada, the United
States and Europe. Recent
solo exhibitions include Beyond
Absurd (2010), Nowhereness (2012)
and Swarf (2013) at the Red Head
Gallery and Nowhereness (2014) at
Artcite, Incorporated, Windsor,
Ontario. Upcoming exhibitions
include Counterpoise at the Red
Head Gallery, Toronto. Kelk is a
graduate of Wellesley College, The
Johns Hopkins University (PhD.),
and the Toronto School of Art
diploma program.

Mark Antony Rossi’s
poetry, criticism, fiction and
photography have appeared in
The Antigonish Review, Another
Chicago
Review,
Bareback
Magazine, Black Heart Review,
Collages & Bricolages, Death
Throes, Deep South Journal,
Ethical Spectacle, Flash Fiction,
The Magill Review, Japanophile,
On The Rusk, Purple Patch, The
Sacrificial and Wild Quarterly.
His most recent play “Eye of the
Needle” was produced by Grin
Theatre, Liverpool, England. A
YouTube recording is available
at: http://markantonyrossi.jigsy.
com.
D.W. Lee
D. W. Lee, cha cha cha.
Clara Lagacé
reads a lot of CanLit, drinks too
much tea, and is trying to grow
her hair long enough to make into
a braid. While waiting for her hair
to lengthen, Clara is completing
her undergraduate degree in
English Literature and Women’s
Studies. Someday, Clara will travel
the world. With a long braid down
her back.

Nate Mosseau
was born in a small town in New
Hampshire. Since leaving, he
has spent time living in Canada,
Kenya, and Spain. He thinks that
photographs have an agency and
can be used to create as opposed to
simply recording. One day he would
like to walk across Uzbekistan.
68

Campbell McClintock’s
clothes were wet when he wrote
this. He went for a bike ride at 7 am,
which is uncharacteristically early
for him, and the rivers of rainwater
on the soggy sunrise streets sprayed
up his back as he rode faster and
faster downhill. For a moment, he
made eye contact with an elderly
woman walking her dog and they
exchanged smiles. Campbell was
having a good day when he wrote
this. He also likes to make ice
cream.

Ilona Martonfi
is the author of two poetry
books, Blue Poppy (Coracle, 2009)
and Black Grass (Broken Rules,
2012), and she has another book
forthcoming: The Snow Kimono
(Inanna, 2015). She writes
in Vallum, The Fiddlehead, Montreal
Serai, Steel Chisel, and elsewhere.
She is the founder/producer of
Yellow Door and Visual Arts
Centre Readings, the co-founder
of Lovers and Others, and
the winner of the QWF 2010
Community Award.
69

Greg Santos
is the author of Rabbit Punch! (DC
Books, 2014) and The Emperor’s
Sofa (DC Books, 2010). His writing
has appeared or is forthcoming
in The Walrus, Geist, The
Montreal Review of Books, and
The Feathertale Review. He is the
poetry editor of carte blanche and
teaches creative writing to at-risk
youth. He lives in Montréal with
his family.

Richard Scarsbrook
is the award-winning author of
the books Cheeseburger Subversive,
Featherless Bipeds, Destiny’s Telescope,
The Monkeyface Chronicles and,
hot off the presses, Nothing Man
and The Purple Zero, a novel for
young adults, Six Weeks, a poetry
collection, and The Indifference
League, an adult novel. Richard
won the 2011 White Pine Award,
and his books have been finalists
for the CLA Book of the Year
Award, the Stellar Book Prize, and
the ReLit Award. His stories and
poems have been published widely,
and have won many individual
prizes. Find out more about
his literary adventures at www.
richardscarsbrook.com.

Mat Sanza
a.k.a DJ TYLENOL is a Montréalborn Culture Studies major at
McGill. When he was six years
old, he got through half a piece of
frozen, (brown) snow-dusted pizza
he’d found next to a sewer grate,
just outside the Ville Saint-Laurent
library, before his mom caught up
to him. All the life-events that
followed were variations on this
theme. He hopes both you and he
will slip past all the guards and get
to shake hands with the Law. In
the meantime, he looks forward to
consuming your art and improving
his.

Judah Schulte
is the name of a 19-year-old soonto-be journalism student who lives
just outside of Vancouver with
his sister, where he is saving up
for a half-decent bicycle and less
devastating student loans.